So in the wake of the first reviews of the new Ford GT coming out, thus the news of it being pretty goddamned awesome and not half a million bucks of hot canuck-made garbage, I thought this would be a good time to share a story about the new Ford GT and the GT name in general, and what it means to my family.

Go back to an innocent time of 2005. A time before the smartphone, before Facebook kicked off, before everyday seemed like another step to the world’s inevitable doom. I was 10. The video game franchise Need For Speed was going through its Fast ‘n Furious stage with the Underground series. Needless to say I thought bodykits, neon underglow, and tribal graphics on a Hyundai Tiburon was the shit. But it’s 2005, which means Need For Speed: Most Wanted was coming out. Now you could have bodykits and tribal graphics on a Lamborghini. My dad, the guy who brought Most Wanted into our house, is probably like many other dads here, in that he’s the reason I’m even here talking to you about kickass cars. Anyway, he’s talking about the new game and all the sick new supercars it has. Lamborghinis, Porsches, Aston Martins, so on. But there was one name he got to that caught my then-underdeveloped brain off guard. He spoke of a mysterious machine called the Ford GT. Again, this was 2005, and Ford at the time
sucker-punched the automotive world by busting out a world-class
supercar that could kick the teeth in of Ferrari’s best. But to me this
was just strange. Ford? The same company making my neighbor’s hunk of
white lipoma then-known as the Taurus? For real? This was when my dad
decided it was time for one of the rare occasions to bust out his
Hotwheels collection, and show me his Ford GT40.

This beautiful bastard right here, that I now own

He then shared the legendary tale of Ford’s 4-year-long asskicking of Ferrari at Le Mans in the 60s. That night changed me in terms of what kind of car enthusiast I’d be. Instead of going through adolescence dreaming of a gold-plated Veyron like alot of naive teens and young adults around me with a passing automotive enthusiam, I have hopes of one day dropping a Hayabusa motor in the back of an original Fiat 500. My horizons were broadened thanks to a toy of a old racecar that, let’s be real here, only a real nerd would know about. Since that night the Ford GT and anything around it became somewhat of an automotive deity in our house.

Fast forward to 2015, still arguably a more innocent time. I’m out of highschool and I’ve turned into the kind of idiot who’s distracted by half a classic Mini on a flatbed. The Detroit Auto Show is inbound, and there’s buzz that Ford has something up it’s sleeve. Leaked floorplans showing something called “Project Phoenix” being flanked by a GT and GT40. Speculation of a new GT was going all kinds of nuts. I didn’t get my hopes up, though. A new Ford GT? Like Ford would have the balls to pull that off now. Then January came. I woke up the first day of the show in my room, still gaining consciousness and lazily going through car news on my phone. I see an article breaking the news of a new Ford GT coming with the photo you see above. I’m pretty sure I had a minor heart attack that morning. After scraping what was left of my brains off the ceiling from the world-class mind blowing, I share the news with my dad. Now me and dad being a pair of car guys, we’re always showing eachother pics and stories of cool cars. His reactions from stuff I bring him usually range from “neat”, “cool”, and “Oh that’s awesome”. That kind of stuff. But then he saw what we now know as the 2017 Ford GT.